Tag Archives: Charles Ives

On Record – Orchestra New England, Orquesta Sinfónica de Navarra / James Sinclair – Ives: Orchestral Works (Naxos)

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Ives
Four Ragtime Dances (1902-04, rev. 1916)
Fugue in Four Keys on ‘The Shining Shore’ (c1903)
The Pond (c1906, rev, c1912-13)
The Rainbow (first version, 1914)
An Old Song Deranged (c1903)
Skit for Danbury Fair (c1909, real. Sinclair)
The Gong on the Hook and Ladder or Fireman’s Parade on Main Street (c1911, rev. 1934)
Chromâtimelôdtune (c1923, real. Singleton)
Tone Roads – no.1 (c1913-14); no.3 (c1911/13-14)
Set of Incomplete Works and Fragments (ed. Singleton/Sinclair, 1974)
March no.2, with ‘Son of a Gambolier’ (c1892)
March no.3, with ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ (c1893)
March ‘The Circus Band’ (c1898-99, rev. 1932-33)
Arrangements (1896-97) – Schubert: Marche militaire in D, D733 No. 1 (1818). Schumann: Valse noble, Op. 9 No. 4 (1834-35). Schubert: Impromptu in C minor, D899 No. 1 (1827)

Orchestra New England, Orquesta Sinfónica de Navarra (arrangements) / James Sinclair

Naxos American Classics 8.559954 [75’43”]
Editions John Kirkpatrick, Jacques-Louis Monod, James Sinclair, Kenneth Singleton and Richard Swift
Producers Neely Bruce, Jan Swafford Engineers Benjamin Schwarz with Jonathan Galle and Gonzalo Noqué

Recorded 24/25 October 2023 at Auditorio Barañaín, Pamplona-Navarra, Spain (arrangements), 12-14 March 2024 at Colony Hall/Choate Rosemary Hall, Wallingford CT, USA

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

What’s the story?

Naxos continues its long-term series devoted to the orchestral music of Charles Ives with this volume of shorter pieces and arrangements, several of them recorded for the first time and conducted by James Sinclair, whose involvement with the composer now stretches back across 50 years.

What’s the music like?

Miniatures for a variety of forces are found right across the four decades of Ives’s composing and range from unformed experiments to perfectly realized exemplars of his idiom. Many of these were collated in the dozen or so Sets that Ives assembled at various stages in his career (recorded on Naxos 8.559917) while there are various others which resist any such compiling, and these can mostly be found here – often in critical editions prepared by a formidable team of Ives scholars, hence rounding out the picture of his creativity in the most immediate terms.

Written at the outset of the genre’s golden age, the Four Ragtime Dances neatly complement each other as regards form and content; elements from each finding their way into the second movement (The Rockstrewn Hills) from the Second Orchestral Set, which builds upon their anarchic humour accordingly. Following the shimmering polytonal ambivalence of the Fugue on ‘The Shining Shore’, the unworldly evocations The Pond and The Rainbow find Ives at his most intimate and confessional – as does the admittedly more genial An Old Song Deranged. Not so Skit for Danbury Fair, its inherent iconoclasm finding greater focus in the graphically descriptive The Gong on the Hook and Ladder or contrasting Tone Roads Nos. 1 and 3 which embody Ives’s thinking on indivisibility of life and music in the most uncompromising terms.

It was once thought Chromâtimelôdtune might be the missing Tone Road No. 2, yet this late and possibly incomplete piece is likely an acerbic response to the Modernism emerging from post-war Europe which seemingly preoccupied Ives in those twilight years of his composing. The three song-based Marches date from an earlier and ostensibly more carefree phase, their debunking couched in humorous terms, while the Set of Incomplete Works and Fragments is a judiciously conceived entity that should not have had to wait 50 years for its first recording. The orchestrations are from Ives’s study with Horatio Parker at Yale: that of Schubert’s First Marche Militaire and Schumann’s Valse noble (from Carnaval) are expert but anonymous, that of Schubert’s First Impromptu results in a ‘theme and variations’ of striking prescience.

Does it all work?

Yes, inasmuch that the effectiveness of these pieces largely depends on the conviction of their performers and, with Sinclair at the helm, this can be taken for granted. As can the excellence of Orchestra New England in repertoire it has often been playing for decades, and if Orquesta Sinfónica de Navarra might appear an unlikely choice for Ives’s undergraduate arrangements, it acquits itself admirably. The sound throughout is unexceptionally fine, and Sinclair’s own annotations are succinctly informative as to the genesis and context of some intriguing music.

Is it recommended?

Indeed, this is a necessary addition to a valuable series – hopefully to be continued before too long with recordings of the Fourth Symphony and Universe Symphony as partially realized by David Porter, of which Sinclair gave a memorable account at the Aldeburgh Festival in 2012.

Listen & Buy

For buying options, you can visit the Naxos website – or listen to the recording on Tidal below:

Click on the names for more information on conductor James Sinclair, Orchestra New England, Orquesta Sinfónica de Navarra and the Charles Ives Society.

Published post no.2,382 – Wednesday 4 December 2024

Playlist – Charles Ives (born 20 October 1874)

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by Ben Hogwood

This month we mark 150 years since the birth of American composer Charles Ives in Connecticut, on 20 October 1874.

Ives is a fascinating and often divisive figure, revered by some yet derided by others. Perhaps because of that his music does not enjoy a great deal of concert hall exposure, but once you begin to explore his output a huge range of music awaits your ears.

No doubt, his music is not for anybody – but if you listen to the playlist below, you will see just what an imaginative composer he was, so much so that his music continues to inspire and even baffle to this day, in the best possible way!

My own Ives watershed came courtesy of the Variations on America, an often outrageous set of variations on the tune behind the British National Anthem, played by the impish organist Simon Preston. Ives said that playing the pedal part on the organ was “as much fun as playing baseball” – a quote that embodies his open and often humourous approach to music. I also had the honour of playing cello in a performance of General William Booth Enters Into Heaven, an eventful and ultimately touching scene for voice and orchestra.

Hymn tunes, folk sources, complex note systems, innovative textures – all these qualities and more are found in the Symphony no.4 alone, while shorter pieces such as The Unanswered Question and Central Park In The Dark show an uncanny ability for mind-opening scene setting.

The message is definitely that the more time you spend with Ives, the more his music reveals. Try it and see how you get on!

Published post no.2,339 – Tuesday 22 October 2024

New music – Jeremy Denk – Ives / Denk (Nonesuch)

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published by Ben Hogwood, with text appropriated from the press release

Nonesuch Records releases Jeremy Denk’s Ives Denk on October 18. The pianist, known as a champion of Charles Ives, is acclaimed for his performances of the great American composer’s works. Ives Denk, released in celebration of the 150th anniversary of Ives’ birth, features the composer’s four violin sonatas, performed with violinist Stefan Jackiw, as well as remastered versions of his Sonatas No. 1 and 2 for piano, from Denk’s 2010 debut recording, Jeremy Denk Plays Ives. ‘In the Barn’, the second movement of Sonata No. 2 for violin and piano, is available to download and can be listened to here:

In his liner note, Denk says that Ives’ “deepest dream was to create an original musical style, a fresh and uniquely American voice. He achieved this. But it was a voice most didn’t want to hear, and still don’t. He is one of history’s least popular populists … Ives’ writing – especially the later ones, when he was in terrible physical decline – are… often unhinged with anger, full of mean-spirited nicknames and simplistic binaries, they reflect some of the worst angles of America. One thing that saves Ives’ music from these dangers is his sense of humour, and his willingness to embrace failure.”

“If there is one piece that sums up for me Ives’ difficult virtues, it is the slow movement of the first violin sonata, a jagged musical reflection on the Civil War, so eerily relevant now, with America split into red-blue madness. It is interesting to compare this kind of piece, profound yet unloved, with the far more identifiably American voice of Aaron Copland … Ives is optimistic but always messy, always falling apart at the seams. His music suggests America will just have to muddle through, and wrestle with its own failure. At this particular historical moment, Ives seems to be more right than ever.”

“‘In the Barn’ is a joyful disaster,” Denk says of the second sonata movement, above. “It starts with country fiddling, slips slyly into urban ragtime, and as time passes, every imaginable genre makes a cameo – overheated Wagnerian Romanticism, fashionable exoticism, a dizzying tour of the early twentieth century musical world.”

Ives / Denk will contain the following repertoire:

Violin Sonata no.4 ‘Children’s Day at the Camp Meeting’
Violin Sonata no.3
Violin Sonata no.2
Violin Sonata no.1
Piano Sonata no.1
Piano Sonata no.2 ‘Concord, Mass., 1840-1860’

Published post no.2,277 – Wednesday 21 August 2024

In concert – Stewart Goodyear, CBSO / Ilan Volkov: Ives, Zappa, Lewis & Gershwin

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Stewart Goodyear (piano), City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Ilan Volkov (above)

Ives Three Places in New England (1911-14, rev. 1929)
Zappa Bob in Dacron and Sad Jane (1982-3)
Lewis Memex (2014)
Gershwin orch. Grofé Rhapsody in Blue (1924, rev. 1942)

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Wednesday 27 March 2024

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

Ilan Volkov is always a welcome presence on the Symphony Hall podium, and this evening he conducted the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in a fascinating programme of works by American composers – three of them established in music notably removed from classical.

The concert was framed by what have now become repertoire pieces, but Ives’s Three Places in New England had to wait over half a century to be accorded this status. Using what sounded to be the most recent edition, Volkov stressed its late-Romantic impulsiveness and rhetorical eloquence, though some over-emphatic pauses or phrasing slightly undersold the cumulative majesty of The Saint Gaudens and coursing energy of Putnam’s Camp – which latter still teetered (rightly) on chaos at its close. If the build-up in The Housatonic at Stockbridge felt unduly precipitate, Rachel Pankhurst’s rendering of its cor anglais melody had ideal pathos.

The three decades since Frank Zappa’s untimely death have brought into focus his sheer range of musical preoccupations, though his pair of early 1980s albums with the London Symphony Orchestra made plain that being one of rock music’s finest guitarists and leading provocateurs was never enough. Despite their linkage via a ballet with its somewhat dubious scenario, Bob in Dacron and Sad Jane are individual entities and their respective two movements underline Zappa’s concern for musical and expressive diversity – whether in the reckless overkill of the male protagonist or halting fatalism of the female. Volkov secured dedicated playing from the CBSO as brought out Zappa’s debt to ‘third stream’ jazz as much as his modernist forebears.

George Lewis is another figure whose creativity ranges over multiple media – not least that of the orchestra which, thanks not least to Volkov’s advocacy, has gained some familiarity in the UK. Its title referring to a theoretical device for establishing connections across an otherwise unregulated body of information, Memex is typical of the composer through its complexity of textures which affords a heady virtuosity but also a measure of subtlety and inwardness, not least in those final stages when the earlier volatility gradually coalesces into something akin to resolution; as if all that information was, if not dispersed, at least finding discipline. Such, at least, was the impression left by this committed reading of a striking and absorbing piece.

It might have been a conceptual leap too far from here to Gershwin’s galvanizing of the ‘jazz age’ aesthetic almost a century earlier, though Rhapsody in Blue has lost relatively little of its edge during the interim – especially when Stewart Goodyear projected the steely spontaneity of its solo part with such gusto. Admittedly the large orchestral forces (a feature of each work heard tonight) lacked a degree of co-ordination in tutti sections, but Volkov was at one with his pianist in conveying the breezy and often brittle excitement of music which sounded as   if evolving in real-time – not least the final stages that emerged as a high-octane apotheosis.

No little excitement, then, was generated over the course of this performance as of this concert overall: just the sort of event the CBSO should be putting on each season, which latter would certainly be the poorer were artists such as Volkov not encouraged to follow their convictions.

Click on the link to read more on the current CBSO concert season, and on the names for more on pianist Stewart Goodyear, conductor Ilan Volkov and composers Frank Zappa and George Lewis.

Published post no.2,133 – Saturday 30 March 2024

On record – Orchestra New England / James Sinclair – Ives: Complete Sets for Chamber Orchestra (Naxos)

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Orchestra New England / James Sinclair

Ives
Set no.1
Set no.2
Set no.3
Set no.4: Three Poets and Human Nature
Set no.5: The Other Side of Pioneering, or Side Lights on American Enterprise
Set no.6: From the Side Hill
Set no.7: Water Colors
Set no.8: Songs without Voices
Set no.9 of Three Pieces
Set no.10 of Three Pieces
Set for Theatre Orchestra

Naxos American Classics 8.559917 [68’17”]

Producer Kenneth Singleton
Engineers Benjamin Schwartz, Jonathan Galle

Recorded 8-9 March 2022 at Colony Hall and Choate Rosemary Hall, Wallingford CT

Written by Ben Hogwood

What’s the story?

James Sinclair here continues his long-term Naxos project devoted to Charles Ives with this first complete release of the sets for chamber orchestra that the composer put together across two decades and several of which are only now receiving their first recordings in this guise.

What’s the music like?

While his contribution to such major genres as the symphony, piano sonata and string quartet can hardly be gainsaid, Ives was no less committed to the miniature – whether in terms of his c130 songs, or nearly 40 evocative vignettes that are collated here. As Sinclair points out, the first three of these sets emerged during the First World War so pre-date the songs which were derived from them, whereas those other seven drew retrospectively on Ives’s songs as well as revising numerous of the composer’s shorter pieces – including his most famous single work.

Those relatively familiar with Ives’s output will be aware of many of the pieces through other media, not least the still excellent When the moon collection which Richard Bernas recorded with Music Projects in the 1990s (Decca) and which remains available for download. The 16 items which became songs are included thus in estimable readings by soprano Susan Narucki or baritone Sanford Sylvian with pianist Alan Feinberg, though the merit in having these sets as an integral series is self-evident as to make it surprising this had not earlier been attempted.

That the first three sets are relatively well-known does not lessen the arresting quality of such items as Ives’ quirky take on a Yale processional which is Calcium Light Night (Set 1/No 5), sardonic elision of (in)famous people in Gyp the Blood’ or Hearst!? Which is Worst?! (2/2), or his stark directive to embrace the future in Premonitions (3/3) with its subsequent setting of Robert Underwood Johnson. The ensuing five sets (Nos. 4 and 8 are recorded here for the first time) each has a descriptive title with which to characterise its content, while the last two sets (again in their first recordings) emerged nearly a decade after Ives had effectively ceased original composition – but inclusion of a (definitive?) version of The Unanswered Question (9/3) and reappearance of Like a Sick Eagle (1/4 & 10/1) thereby brings the series full circle.

Also featured here is the Set for Theatre Orchestra that Ives assembled around the same time as the First Set, and whose individual items between them encapsulate three distinct facets of his mature idiom – being respectively ominous, uproarious and nostalgic in their expression.

Does it all work?

It does indeed. Taken overall this collection might be felt to represent the essential Ives – its diversity of contents allied to its economy of means comparable to the orchestral miniatures which Webern composed some years earlier, not least by their exuding comparable intensity of expression. It helps to have so attuned an Ivesian as Sinclair at the helm, who directs with precision and insight these pieces – many of which he, Kenneth Singleton and David Porter realized for performance. Both sound and annotations are fully on a par with these readings.

Is it recommended?

Very much so. This is the fifth volume of Ives which Sinclair has now recorded for Naxos and, whether the series is slated to run to eight or nine volumes, it is building into the most inclusive and reliable edition of the composer’s orchestral output that has so far been made.

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Buy

For more information on this release and purchasing options, visit Naxos Direct. For more information on the conductor’s Ives discography, visit the James Sinclair page on the Naxos website